Cream of Rice
(Paris.) Wash, drain, and parboil 1/2 pound of rice; add 1 quart of chicken broth, salt, pepper, and parsley, and a tablespoonful of chopped onions. Cook 1 hour and press through a sieve; add yolks of 2 eggs mixed with 2 tablespoonfuls cream and 6 forcemeat balls and some asparagus tips, both cooked previously. The balls must be made of chicken and bread-crumbs.
A classic French velvet soup — rice cooked to collapse in broth, sieved, and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Everything hinges on the last step: the yolks must thicken the soup without setting.
- The liaison is the whole dishWhisk the yolks and cream together, temper them with a ladle of the hot soup, then stir the mixture back into the pot off the heat. Return it to a low burner only until it thickens slightly, around 170-175F; a boil will scramble the yolks and the soup turns grainy past recovery.
- Quantities and yieldHalf a pound of rice is about 1 1/4 cups raw, and a quart is 4 cups of broth. This makes roughly 4 to 6 servings as a first course.
- Expect to add more brothAn hour of simmering plus sieving leaves a very thick purée — closer to a paste than a soup. Keep another cup or two of warm broth at hand and thin to the consistency of heavy cream before adding the yolks.
- Parboiling the riceThe recipe gives no time; a couple of minutes in boiling water, then drained, is the likely sense. It would have helped rid the grain of loose starch, and it still keeps the soup from tasting pasty. Use a plain long- or medium-grain white rice, not parboiled/converted or basmati.
- Sieve or blender"Press through a sieve" means a wooden spoon and a fine sieve, or a food mill. A blender or immersion blender does it in seconds, but pass the result through a sieve afterward if you want the true velvet texture.
- Forcemeat ballsGround raw chicken bound with soft breadcrumbs, seasoned, rolled marble-sized and poached in broth for 5 to 6 minutes until firm. Make them small — six balls across six bowls is a garnish, not a dumpling course.
- Asparagus tipsBlanch 2 to 3 minutes in salted water and shock in cold water so they stay green. Add them and the balls to the finished soup only to warm through.
- SeasoningThe recipe leans entirely on the broth. Taste after sieving and again after the liaison, and add the parsley late — an hour of simmering kills it, so hold back some chopped parsley to stir in at the end.
This is one of the recipes Adelaide Keen collected abroad for With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902), a book built on the premise that an American cook could learn more from foreign kitchens than from her own cookbook shelf; the bracketed "(Paris.)" is the book's way of citing its source. The dish itself belongs to the French family of potages purées and crèmes — a starch cooked soft in broth, sieved, then enriched at the last moment with egg yolk and cream, the liaison often associated with Escoffier's generation and one the earlier nineteenth-century kitchen seems already to have taken for granted. Rice was a standard thickener for such soups, and it has the advantage of leaving no flour taste. The chicken forcemeat balls and asparagus tips are a garnish in the older sense: small, cooked separately, so they keep their shape and colour against the pale soup.